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More crime in the UK: The case against nurse Lucy Letby, charged with 8 murders and another 10 attempts of murder is nearing the end. Lucy Letby was a NICU nurse in Countess of Chester hospital at a time where there was a dramatic increase in mortality of new born infants. She was first arrested i 2018 after 1 year of investigations, and then again in 2019 and 2020 when she was was finally charged.
I have followed the court case which has lasted for 8 months somewhat sporadically, and I think the prosecution has made a strong case. The motive seems to be the thrill and excitement of being in the middle of life and death situations, and even to get the attention of a married doctor she fancied (and might have slept with!) Interestingly, the defense had no expert testimony. Their only witness, except Letby, was a plumper who testified that the ward had a sewage leak coinciding with some of the incidents. What has kept me coming back to this case, is how incredibly plain and even boring, Letby appears outside of these charges. No history of violence or aggression, no weird sexual fetishes, no drug use. They have gone through every last text message and email and not found anything offensive, bar discussing her job and the doctor. She had a normal upringing and good relations with her family. I think its very likely she would never have been a murderer if she didnt have access to vulnerable babies as a nurse, which makes it even more of a headf**k, because the crimes she is charged with are against babies! Its absolutely heinous, and my heart breaks for the helpless parents who had no choice but to trust her with the lives of their newborns. She targeted twins and triplets, and one set of parents lost 2 boys.
So where is the culture war angle? I guess the lack of attention and interest that this case has got is baffling to me. Neither BBC nor The Guardian nor Sky news have had it on their frontpage as far as ive seen this week. BBC has confined the whole story to a regional site for Merseyside: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-65920366
Apparently a nurse potentially being one of the most prolific female serial killers in history, is not all that exciting in todays newsworld. I guess everyone can have their own biases for why this is happening. Is it the "women are wonderful effect", where a female killer is just so bizarre that it does not warrant any closer scrutiny? Would there be some articles about toxic masculinity if it was a male nurse who killed babies to impress a female doctor? Are people just less upset because she is a conventionally beautiful young woman with blond hair and blue eyes? Some redditors seem to think so, as the first doctor to suspect her was Ravi Jayaram, an Indian male. But I dont buy this either. If her looks where protecting her people would be rallying to her defense, which does not seem to be happening either. The case is mostly ignored.
Is the case just too boring?
This is why I have long believed that crime is worse in Europe than the Us (not just Eastern or Southern Europe) and that social media only make it seem like crime is worse in the US (such as viral footage of shoplifters or hoodlums in the US). Hardly anyone pays attention to UK crime , but it exists and is bad, such as assaults with knives, shoplifting, pickpockets, property crime, etc. If ex-Eastern Europe had America's demographics , crime there would go through the roof.
And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bicycle. What does this even mean? "If the UK was more like America, it would be more like America." Like - yeah?
Without endorsing the theory, one could consider a country's crime rate as a multiple of the country's capacity for law-enforcement/general socialization and the innate criminal tendency of the population. The claim then would be that Europe's relatively lower crime rates are almost entirely a consequence of the tendencies of their population, and in fact their law-enforcement/socialization are relatively worse, not better; if they had the USA's demographics, their crime problem would be worse than that of the USA.
US probably has better law enforcers, but as a whole, Europe has better law enforcement. This is because they have more cops than US, but less crime. Because of this, when American cops must heavily prioritize their efforts, European cops are under much less pressure, and can afford to spend their time on investigating and prosecuting much more trivial offenses. The result of this is that all crime is at risk of being prosecuted; shoplifters know that if they get caught, they face jail, and so do people who do drugs (yes, simple possession is illegal and heavily enforced in huge swaths of Europe). This makes people respect law much more, which feeds the virtuous cycle of less crime -> more time to enforce the law -> more respect for law -> less crime.
America and the EU spend similar shares of GDP on law enforcement we just spend a much larger share on prisons than the EU does.
Gross spending aside, the US has 2.4 cops per 1,000 citizens while the EU averages 3.3. So they have about a third more cops per person than the US does.
The EU is also roughly half the size of the US; this means that there are significantly more cops per square mile, and cops are far more effective when they don't need to travel an hour one way to respond to a call.
I really doubt that has much to do with it, since crime tends to concentrate in high-population areas.
For one obvious counter example, Canada's population density is 90% lower than the US, and they have 30% fewer cops than the US, yet crime rates are significantly lower. There are other factors involved too, obviously, but I don't think there is much evidence for the thesis that the need for police officers scales by area rather than population.
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